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Is Personifying Reality Useful? |
Is personifying Reality by using the term God useful? What good does it do to tag Reality with the label God. Is the Church of Reality bowing to social pressure by including God references? Shouldn't Realists just reject the idea of God completely? If we reference God in the context of Reality won't religious people misinterpret it to say that scientists believe in God? Isn't using God and Reality together a form of scientific blasphemy? Can't we please just make God go away and move on to pure science?
These are all good questions. But there are arguments to be made that applying the word God to Reality is useful. Since this is about labeling and definitions of words ultimately it is subjective. So there isn't a right or wrong answer on this one. It's more of a way to explore and understand existential concepts. So let's look at the other side - why defining God as a personification of Reality is useful.
Reality fills God's empty chair.
One of the problems with God is that God has been the ultimate empty chair. I remember as a boy I had to go through the Passover Seder where we would fill Elijah's cup with wine. Elijah was sort of like Santa, an invisible guy who would come around to all the Jewish households to drink a little from each cup. At least that's the way I understood it as a kid. But Elijah never came and I closely monitored the level of the cup to see if the level ever changed, and it didn't. One Seder I drank Elijah's cup. My father got angry. "What happened to the wine?", he asked. "Elijah came and drank it!" (Now who isn't the believer?)
God and Elijah have the same problem. They are both an empty seat inviting all sorts of fictional ideas to be treated as real. There's even the expectation that "someone is sitting in the empty chair and it is called God." You are supposed to imaging that you see someone in the empty chair and then we can all believe God is there sitting in the empty chair.
The problem with the empty chair is that there are all these religions who are making up gods to sit in the empty chair. God of the Jews gave them Israel and they take great offense to anyone who even questions their right to real estate the the guy in the empty chair gave them. Christians believe that they have an updated God as defined by the New Testament that makes them successors to the Jews, and anyone who doesn't believe what they believe will burn in Hell forever. Islam also has exclusivity to the empty chair claiming that if you aren't a Muslim then you are an Infidel and you deserve to be killed. And in many parts of the world it is acceptable to murder Infidels.
The empty chair is dangerous because it creates an expectation that God is sitting there and invites invites people to take this seriously and make this their central premise for relating to Reality. The empty chair is a false god. Reality is the most mighty God. Reality it tougher that Jehovah, Yahweh, or Allah because Reality is real and the rest of them are not real.
As we can see the only true God candidate is Reality, and we have also seen that all religions claim to pursue the Truth. The definition of Truth is Reality. So if we put Reality in the empty God chair then the chair is no longer empty. Reality displaces and replaces all other Gods and becomes the One True God.
Reality as God displaces mythical gods.
They say that you can't prove God doesn't exist because you can't prove a negative. But actually you can. By showing as we do here that the only God candidate is Reality itself, and by putting Reality on the God chair, it disproves all other gods. Maybe the best way to prove God doesn't exists is to prove God does exist - but the God that exists isn't the one from the Bible stories, but the one that is backed up by science. By elevating Reality to the title God it pushes all the other gods out of the way.
If we personify evolution as Darwin, then what does Darwin want us to do?
Personification is also useful in helping the human brain understand complex ideas. For example, let's personify evolution and call it Darwin. Darwin will be the personification of the process of evolution. So we can then ask the question, "What does Darwin want us to do?"
Since evolution is a process that selects on what survives the Darwin wants us to survive. Darwin wants us to succeed. Darwin doesn't want us to fail because then Darwin has to start over. If we do what Darwin wants we will continue to evolve and thrive. If we don't then we will go extinct.
So what is Darwin telling us? If we look at the historical record we can see that the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid. Why did they go extinct? Because they failed to develop a space program. The lesson we can learn from this is that Darwin wants us to fund NASA. If we don't fund NASA then the next big asteroid will wipe us out too. But if we do what Darwin wants then we'll see it coming and we'll be able to push it out of the way. Darwin wants us to limit our population. Darwin wants us to stop poisoning our environment. Darwin wants us to migrate into Space.
Darwin wants us to live in Right Relationship with Reality. In order to live in harmony with Reality we have to study Reality, We have to know Reality. Or - if we personify Reality as God then Darwin wants us to know God.
When Reality is the new God, Science is the new Bible. Evidence is Scripture.
Personification is useful in that it creates an upgrade path for the old Bible Story version of God to the science based modern version of God where God is really Reality. One doesn't convert to Realism, it's more of an upgrade to the latest version. Reality is essentially God 2.0. Science is the new Bible. Evidence is the new scripture.
One can make the argument that why should you worship an old dead God who hasn't been seen in thousands of years when you can have a relationship with the new God (Reality) which is very much alive and still speaking to us through evidence.
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